Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

There is a growing split between protectionists and free traders, and it's not going away

Some wars spawn further wars; so it is with Donald Trump’s trade war with China, which has sparked a veritable civil war within his own Republican Party. Rarely has the standoff between protectionists and free traders been as overt and vitriolic as it is now, with possibly quite damaging consequences for Republican candidates in November’s mid-term Congressional elections.

Historical comparisons are on the whole not a particularly helpful guide to the present, but on this occasion they seem worth making. The parallels with Britain’s own schism over the Corn Laws in the mid-Nineteenth Century – which split...